The enterprise computing landscape has undergone a fundamental shift in storage architectures in that central-service architecture has given way to distributed storage clusters. As businesses seek ways to increase storage efficiency, such clusters built of commodity computers can deliver high performance, availability and scalability for new data-intensive applications at a fraction of cost compared to monolithic disk arrays. To unlock the full potential of storage clusters, the data is replicated across multiple geographical locations increasing availability and reducing network distance from clients.
Garbage collection can be a problem for administratively decentralized storage systems which manage large distributed objects. A garbage collector is responsible for reclaiming disk space by deleting objects that are no longer referenced. Distributed garbage collection in storage clusters is further complicated by common failures of machines and network partitions, which make it difficult if not impossible to get a global synchronous view of objects and their references.